On the flip side, McConnell punished fellow Republicans pushing for new campaign finance restrictions. In 1998, he withheld funding from the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the campaign of Linda Smith, a Washington congresswoman who was challenging Democratic senator Patty Murray. Smith was a staunch conservative who had fought to cut government spending and limit abortions, but she also favored getting special interest money out of politics. Dale Foreman, then the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, recalls meeting with McConnell in his Senate office to find out what sort of support the NRSC would provide to unseat Murray and hearing the unvarnished warning: if Linda Smith got the nomination, her support for campaign finance reform would keep the NRSC out of the race. “He was very lukewarm on her candidacy,” says Foreman. “It was very clear that he did not want Linda Smith to be the nominee for the state of Washington and if she was, he was not in favor of using national money to support her candidacy.” McConnell held true to his word. Smith was left to fend for herself, and Murray won reelection easily.
Linda Smith was not the only natural ally to face repercussions for backing campaign finance reform. In the wake of the campaign funding scandals of the 1996 election, the Committee for Economic Development, an alliance of centrist business leaders, started exploring possible reforms to a system that encouraged cronyism and forced them to entertain constant entreaties for campaign money. “We prefer to compete in the marketplace, not the political realm,” says Charles Kolb, the organization’s then president. “People didn’t like the shakedown.” In 1999, the committee put out a report on the issue. When CNN did a segment on it, it introduced the news with a video of a man biting a dog, to convey the unlikeliness of big businesses speaking out against corporate money in politics. “We were going against the conventional wisdom: it was, ‘Wait a minute, there are people in business who don’t like the system?’ ” says Kolb. “We were challenging that, and saying that [the status quo] was a bad thing for the country, a bad thing for the economy, and a bad thing for the business community.”
Not long after the report appeared, several of the committee’s board members got a letter from the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Mitch McConnell, asking them, in Kolb’s words, “How could you of all people be associated with an organization that is in bed with radical environmentalists?” It was so “crudely” written, Kolb says, that the business leaders who received it assumed it had been drafted by an overzealous NRSC staff member, and disregarded it. But soon afterward, a second set of letters arrived on the same letterhead. This time there was no doubt of its provenance: at the bottom of the letters was a handwritten note from McConnell himself saying, essentially, “I hope you will resign from the CED.”
Kolb was taken aback. He had a friendly history with McConnell—he had served as general counsel at the United Way under Elaine Chao’s leadership, had gone with his wife out to dinner with McConnell and Chao, and had contributed to McConnell’s Senate campaign. And he did not understand why McConnell was so protective of the flawed status quo. “There’s a strong conservative case to be made in favor of campaign finance reform,” Kolb says. “I thought conservatives were in favor of the market as opposed to rent-seeking within the system.”
The showdown made its way onto the front page of the New York Times. It drew some sympathetic business leaders and foundations to CED, but also cost it one major member, BellSouth. When Kolb asked an executive from the company why it was stopping its contributions to CED, he said: “Senator McConnell is a very important senator to this company.”
At around the same time, McConnell made an even more direct challenge of the reform camp, on the floor of the Senate, setting off one of the chamber’s more remarkable exchanges in modern history. On October 14, 1999, he dared John McCain to elaborate on his general argument that the money flooding campaigns was corrupting Washington. “For there to be corruption, someone must be corrupt,” McConnell said. “I just ask my friend from Arizona what he has in mind here?”
McCain was easy to rile, but here he declined the bait. “I refuse to . . . say that any individual or person is guilty of corruption in a specific way,” he said. The problem was more diffuse than that, he said. “There is a pernicious effect of money on the legislative process,” he argued. “I am attacking a system. I am attacking a system that has to be fixed. . . . This system makes good people do bad things. . . . All of us are corrupted by it because money buys access and access is influence.”
McConnell kept up the taunting. “How,” he asked, “can it be corruption if no one is corrupt? That is like saying the gang is corrupt but none of the gangsters are. If there is corruption, someone must be corrupt.”
McCain held firm. “That is not right. It is a system. It is a system that has violated the process and has therefore caused the American people to lose confidence and trust in the government.” At one point, he finally turned on McConnell, though without naming him, as he cited as one example of generalized corruption McConnell’s reassurance to other senators about voting against McCain’s antismoking bill a year earlier: “A certain senator stood up and said it was okay for you not to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies will run ads in our favor.”
Afterward, as McCain’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was getting off the ground, McCain ran into Charles Kolb at a luncheon. They got to discussing McConnell, and Kolb mentioned the dinner that he and his wife had been to with McConnell and Chao years earlier. After being quiet at first, McConnell had opened up and been perfectly pleasant.
While he was relaying this story, Kolb says, McCain was gritting his teeth. “I haven’t,” McCain said when Kolb finished, “been privileged to see that side of him.”
* * *
The rivalry resolved itself in a great victory for McCain. Or at least so it seemed at the time. For all of McConnell’s maneuvering, he was unable to turn back the pro-reform tide that swelled amid the corporate scandals that followed the bursting of the tech-stock bubble, notably the 2001 collapse of Enron. That company had blanketed Capitol Hill with nearly $2 million in contributions over the previous four years. In the spring of 2002, the Senate passed the McCain-Feingold law—formally the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002—and Bush signed it into law. McConnell stood against it until the end, warning in a New York Times op-ed (“In Defense of Soft Money”) that the legislation “will not take any money out of politics. It just takes the parties out of politics,” and in a floor speech of a “brave new world where the voices of parties are quieted, the voices of billionaires are enhanced, the voices of newspapers are enhanced.”
But McConnell’s seemingly lonely resistance had come with an invaluable consolation prize: the lasting gratitude of his fellow Republican senators. He hadn’t exactly been embraced by his colleagues from the outset—he had, after all, lost in his first two bids to run the NRSC. But for the better part of a decade, he had made himself the face of opposition to reforms that he believed, and many others in the GOP Senate caucus agreed, would work to their party’s detriment. Speaking up on behalf of the right to give and spend unlimited sums from corporate donors was not something most politicians were eager to do, but Mitch McConnell had taken up the task. And for that, his colleagues owed him a debt beyond what they’d already incurred from his prodigious fund-raising at the helm of the NRSC. “McConnell was not yet a leader [of the Republican caucus], and here he was protecting a lot of people by taking the heat,” says Scott Harshbarger, who led Common Cause at the time and had previously served as attorney general of Massachusetts. “McConnell instinctively saw an opportunity to be an opposition force—he became the shield.”
Not only that, but McConnell’s stand against campaign finance reform raised a profile otherwise lacking in a legislative focus. Where McConnell was once but one in a crowd of new Republican senators from the South, he was now the notorious adversary of McCain and his admirers in the liberal media. An
d he relished it—after being branded the “Darth Vader” of money in politics, he once brought a light saber to a press conference. Taking up the fight “was a very smart political move,” says Harshbarger. “Behind it may have been high principle, but at the time, it made his mark, and he had a lot of chits coming out of it. Otherwise, as a person he had no presence that would attract leadership—he was a milquetoast kind of guy. Before he got demonized, it was, ‘Who the hell was Mitch McConnell?’ ”
Best of all, the downside was minimal. As much as McConnell liked to cast his opposition as an unpopular stand for principle, he knew that campaign finance reform was not an issue that excited voters back home. As he liked to say, “It ranks right up there with static cling as one of the great concerns among the American people.” If anything, getting attacked by the New York Times and liberal activists for his opposition to reform was only helping McConnell strengthen his standing with conservative voters in Kentucky who might otherwise be wary of him. When Ellen Miller, a leader of the campaign finance reform movement, organized ads against McConnell in Kentucky attacking him for his opposition to McCain-Feingold, it backfired, recalls Harshbarger: “It got him only bigger margins.”
McConnell did not drop the crusade with the passage of the law. Wasting no time, he led the move to challenge its constitutionality in court, and in 2003, the Supreme Court heard McConnell v. Federal Election Commission. A few months later, a slender 5–4 majority ruled for upholding most of the law. McConnell called it the “worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case”—a declaration that overlooked plenty of historically dubious rulings, such as Korematsu v. United States (1944), justifying the mass internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans without individual cause, and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upholding a Louisiana law requiring the racial segregation of railway passengers.
Redemption came six years later, in 2010, with another 5–4 ruling by a reconfigured Supreme Court. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission eviscerated restrictions on campaign spending by corporations, unions, and nonprofit groups, ruling that the free speech rights that allowed independent campaign spending by individuals applied to corporations as well. It did not overturn McCain-Feingold, per se—unlimited “soft money” for parties was still barred—but together with a string of other court and regulatory rulings it rendered the law increasingly irrelevant and vulnerable to dismantling by future court decisions.
Following the ruling, spending on elections by outside groups surged to $300 million in 2010, more than quadruple the previous midterm election, and to more than $1 billion in 2012, triple what it had been in 2008. This surge gave McConnell the chance to declare himself vindicated over his earlier warning that McCain-Feingold’s bar on soft money would only shift the big money into “shadowy groups with innocuous-sounding names” outside the purview of the two major political parties, thereby weakening those institutions and empowering deep-pocketed fringe groups or individuals. This claim was valid, but only to a point—the boom in outside spending would not have been as great had the Supreme Court, in a ruling McConnell celebrated, not liberated outside groups to spend so freely on elections.
Moreover, McConnell and his party were not exactly holding back from capitalizing on the new free-for-all he had warned against early in the decade. The largest outside group to rise to prominence after the ruling was American Crossroads, an organization with deep ties to the Republican establishment. Its cofounder was Karl Rove, and its president was Steven Law, the former chief of staff to both McConnell and Elaine Chao, who had subsequently also worked with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In a sense, Crossroads offered an ideal combination to the Republican establishment in Washington—even if it was not allowed to coordinate directly with candidates, with Law at the helm it could be counted on to adopt strategies in line with the party leadership in Washington; at the same time, the group could accept far larger contributions than candidates, the party, or party committees like the NRSC could.
Even better, the contributions to American Crossroads’ sister organization, Crossroads GPS, did not have to be disclosed, as it was classified as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group, ostensibly more focused on “social welfare” than elections. This designation made Crossroads GPS a more appealing target for publicity-shy donors—while the regular Crossroads group raised $50 million for the 2012 campaign, GPS raised $123 million, $22.5 million of which came from a single anonymous donor. “I wouldn’t want to discount the value of confidentiality to some donors,” said Law in 2010.
The rise in undisclosed contributions raised questions reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Nixon White House had rustled up millions in secret donations from major companies worried they’d get hit with a tax audit or other penalty if they didn’t give. Once again, with Crossroads GPS and similar groups, vast sums were trading hands without the public’s knowledge. But that was only half the problem—while the public didn’t know who was giving what, the people giving and receiving the money most certainly did, and so, presumably, did others in the party network in Washington. This combination of private disclosure and public nondisclosure gave enormous leverage to the fund-raisers: a company or individual approached for funds knew that if they rejected the advance, word might well get back to elected officials in Washington who would have sway over matters of importance to the company or individual; further raising the pressure was the fact that the targeted donor had no way of knowing whether his or her company’s business rivals were or were not giving themselves.
With disclosure, one could at least attempt to connect the dots and hold elected officials accountable. In late 2012, lawmakers on Capitol Hill slipped language into the big “fiscal cliff ” deal that gave biotech giant Amgen another two years before a kidney dialysis drug it makes would be subject to price controls—a tweak that would cost Medicare an estimated $500 million. Reporting on the added language, the New York Times noted that Amgen had close ties with Mitch McConnell, along with other senior lawmakers. Its employees had contributed $73,000 to him since 2007, including at a fund-raising event for him that Amgen helped sponsor while the fiscal cliff deal was being crafted, and its lobbyists included another of McConnell’s former chiefs of staff.
But there was no similar accountability to be done with “social welfare” groups such as Crossroads GPS, since the identity of its donors was secret. Who was to say if Amgen had given heavily to that organization in 2012? Or, to take another example: somehow a budget implementation bill in 2012 wound up including a tax provision that threatened to quash the growing roll-your-own-cigarette industry. Who was to know if tobacco companies had given to Crossroads GPS and thus raised their odds of getting that language added? There was no way of knowing if that happened. Or if it didn’t.
Even as his position on spending limits or PACs or soft money shifted, McConnell had spoken in favor of public disclosure of political giving and spending. It had become his ultimate mantra: stop trying to limit the inevitable flow of money into campaigns, but just make sure it’s all out in the open. “Disclosure is the best disinfectant, and I think the maximum amount of disclosure is exactly what we need,” he said on a Sunday morning show in 1996. Given how much concern he’d continued to express about unaccountable spending outside the party structure, it seemed natural that McConnell would continue to insist on disclosure of those outside dollars.
Even that last plank fell away. In 2010 Senate Democrats introduced the Disclose Act, legislation that would have forced outside groups spending more than $10,000 on campaign-related expenditures to disclose contributors who had donated more than $10,000. It was, says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the “last best hope for doing anything to ameliorate Citizens United.” McConnell held together his caucus—even John McCain—for a successful filibuster of the bill. McConnell explained his reversal on disclosure by arguing that the bill favored unions and that the increasingly toxic political atmosphere put a new premium on protecting t
he privacy of major donors against what he called “liberal thugs.” To one Senate Democrat who had supported the bill, McConnell’s opposition to disclosure after years of speaking in favor of it was remarkable. “It’s startling how flexible some people are in their opinions,” he said. “For him, it’s a matter of political convenience.”
As with his previous shifts, though, this maneuver could also be explained by changing circumstances in the partisan landscape. The biggest spending by outside groups, by far, was being spent on the right, by groups such as Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, and the Crossroads network, which raised more than $70 million for the Republican sweep in 2010, more than any other group. This had prompted an admission of gratitude from McConnell for Crossroads’ assistance: “We had a better day than we otherwise would have in 2010.” As McConnell’s campaign was gearing up in late 2013 for his sixth Senate race, Crossroads—with his former chief of staff, Steven Law, still at the helm—announced it would spend heavily to keep McConnell in power. “It certainly is personal to me,” Law told the Herald-Leader.
With the barrels of anonymously donated money waiting to be unloaded in Kentucky, promise of even greater resources arrived with another Supreme Court ruling in the spring of 2014. In McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the court was now eliminating the limits on how much donors could give overall in direct contributions to candidates, party committees, and political action committees in a given year. The decision was sweet indeed for McConnell—it was another blow to the underpinnings of McCain-Feingold, and Chief Justice John Roberts’s argument against big money being corrupting echoed McConnell’s challenge of McCain on the Senate floor years earlier.
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